


break/remake

by NightsMistress



Category: Super Dangan Ronpa 2
Genre: Flashbacks, Post-Game, Pre-Epilogue, Self-Acceptance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-24
Updated: 2015-12-24
Packaged: 2018-05-08 13:40:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,912
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5499092
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NightsMistress/pseuds/NightsMistress
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Scarred, battered, and traumatized, the survivors of the Remnants of Despair are starting to make their steps toward the future. Hajime hopes to help them move forward, assuming he can accept himself first.</p>
            </blockquote>





	break/remake

**Author's Note:**

  * For [vantas](https://archiveofourown.org/users/vantas/gifts).



> My thanks to Moontyger and prosodiical for the beta.

_Tap. Tap. Tap._

Hajime turns his head to face the sound. Red lacquered nails are tapping against the metal frame of his bed, attached to the hand of a girl he’s never seen before. Pretty as a model, the girl’s eyes are bright and attentive as she reads a clipboard that looks like it belongs in a hospital.

“Hinata Hajime?” She sounds out each syllable of his name as if they are unfamiliar words. “What a boring name.”

He opens his mouth to ask who she is, because she shouldn’t be here. The only people allowed to be here are the ones working on the Hope Cultivation Project, and she doesn’t look like a scientist. She’s dressed as a gyaru, her bleached-blonde hair tied up in twin-tails, and wearing dramatic makeup. He doesn’t know much about scientists, but all the ones he sees here are adults, wearing lab coats, and while they do things to him they don’t talk to him at all.

The only sound he can make is a strangled croak. 

She leans forward and places her finger onto his dry lips. “Shhh,” she says. She smiles and it is a hook drawing him in. “You don’t want me to not come back, do you?” Her voice changes, adopting a cutesy lisp. “It must be so _lonely_ here all by yourself.”

She’s the strangest girl he’s ever met, but she’s right. It is terribly lonely here. Ever since he agreed to be part of the Hope Cultivation Project, he’s been cut off entirely from the outside world. For him, his world has become the four walls of this room; the scratchy starchiness of the sheets of the bed, the half-dimmed lights overhead. He wonders whether anyone has noticed his absence or whether he was so ordinary, so boring, that his presence was forgotten immediately.

“You can be Our secret!” she proclaims regally, drawing her chin up. “It’s a great honour, you understand.”

 _Wait,_ Hajime thinks. _Wouldn’t you being here be_ my _secret?_

And then he was woken up by the shrill tones of his alarm. Hajime groaned, throwing an arm over his face to try and muffle out the sound. The sound of his alarm was impersonal, which made it better than being woken up by Monokuma, but he didn’t think he was ever going to be a morning person. It didn’t help that dreaming of the past always left him feeling unsettled and uncertain, as if the ground under his feet was going to dissolve into intangible data and he had never awoken from the simulation.

Dreaming of Enoshima Junko always put him in an irritable mood, one that made him want to isolate himself from the others. The old Hajime might have given into that impulse, but the old Hajime had also thrown away everything that was meaningful about himself. The old Hajime was isolated and through that isolation had been made into a tool to do terrible things. He was no longer that person.

The Hajime that awoke from the simulator had friends, and it was that thought that got him out of bed and dressed for the day. It got him out of his spartan room, with just a bed and a dresser, and down to the cafeteria where they ate breakfast.

“Hey,” he said in greeting as he walked in, and was met with a jumble of greetings back ranging from Sonia’s genteel ‘good morning’ to Owari’s garbled mess through a mouthful of food. Hajime grinned as he sat down with his breakfast for the day. It was simple fare: boiled rice, miso soup, and tofu in a salty broth, but it tasted much better than it had in the simulator. He nodded over at Togami as he ate apart from the others, and Togami stared at him as if he were a bug that had had the audacity to pretend to be a person. Hajime tried not to take it personally; the Togami he had known wasn’t this one, after all.

“You missed the big news,” Kuzuryuu said as he passed the soy sauce to Hajime to flavour his rice. “Those Future Foundation bastards are calling back Naegi, Kirigiri and Togami. They have to leave by the end of the week.”

“Oh,” Hajime said. He looked down at his rice, which was now drenched in soy sauce, and handed it back to Kuzuryuu before he could do more damage to his breakfast. He remembered the email from the Future Foundation calling for the deaths of the Remnants of Despair, and felt ill at the prospect. He swallowed. “Did they say what they’re going to do about us?”

“Naegi-san said that they would not tell their superiors about us,” Sonia said. She gripped her tea cup tightly, the only physical clue of the turmoil that Hajime knew she must be experiencing.

“They better not,” Souda moaned. “We didn’t survive the simulation just to get killed now!”

“If they try anything, I’ll break them in two!” Owari said around a mouthful of food.

“I’m right here,” said Togami, biting each word off cleanly as he spoke. “We are not going to tell the Future Foundation about you. Yet.”

“What do you mean _yet_ ,” Kuzuryuu said darkly. 

Togami looked over the frames of his glasses at the group, expression clearly unimpressed. “Eventually they are going to see through whatever lies Naegi tells them. Until then, we won’t reveal your whereabouts.”

“Bastard,” Kuzuryuu hissed under his breath.

“They already know we’re here!” Souda pointed out. “They could show up any time, and then what?”

“When they find us, we’ll just have to show them that we’re not part of Ultimate Despair anymore,” Hajime said. He looked around to each of the survivors in turn, and forced himself to sound more positive than he felt. “The world’s a mess right now, but we’re proof that it can get better. Right, guys?”

Sonia returned his smile. “You are quite right,” she said. “We may have once been part of Ultimate Despair, but now we have returned to our true selves. If they come, they will learn that we are no longer a danger.”

Hajime could hear Togami mutter, “Good luck with that.” He didn’t acknowledge it.

“Yeah!” Souda said. “It’s just like Miss Sonia to be inspiring like that!”

Sonia pointedly ignored him, her exasperation clear.

Hajime felt bad for Souda. It seemed that waking up from the simulator had done little to impress on him that Sonia found his attention off-putting. Instead of wading into the conversation, he ate his breakfast quickly, making a face at the overwhelming taste of the soy sauce in his rice. He ate it anyway. The time in the funhouse meant that he understood the importance of food, even if the taste really wasn’t to his liking.

“I ’spose until they go, we’re gonna have to do those videos,” Owari said.

Since the five of them had woken up from the simulation, they had been asked to participate in a series of daily recorded interviews with Kirigiri in order to find out how they had been turned into part of Ultimate Despair, and how they had awoken with all of their memories intact. Hajime hated the process, as he always felt wrung out and exhausted afterward, but given that Naegi, Kirigiri and Togami had entered the simulation to save them, he didn’t feel like he could refuse the request. If it meant saving the world from what they had done, who was he to deny them?

Hajime sighed. “Yeah, I guess so. We do … owe it to them for saving us.”

“Man, I just hate _doing_ it,” Souda said. “I hate remembering all that stuff. It’s easy for you, you don’t remember hardly any of it.”

Hajime grimaced. That wasn’t quite true. The others remembered what they had done as part of Ultimate Despair, and those memories sat uneasily against the memories of their experiences in the simulator. Hajime, on the other hand, remembered what he had done as both Hinata Hajime and Kamukura Izuru, but those memories were often without context. He wasn’t sure if that made the memories worse or not, because he often had no idea what would trigger a flashback. 

He could no longer lift a chair from the ground without remembering the heft of it in his hands as he bludgeoned someone to death with it, feeling their skull give way under the force of his blows. That had been a terrible thing to remember, especially given that he had felt absolutely _nothing_ at the time. Not rage or fear, but instead a hollow emptiness.

“That is not fair of you to say,” Sonia said sternly as he mentally shook away the remnants of the memory. “You know as well as all of us that Hinata-kun remembers things as well.”

Souda looked cowed. “I know,” he grumbled. “I just hate it.”

“We all hate it, asshole,” Kuzuryuu said. “We still gotta do it.”

“I’ll go first,” Hajime said. “I might as well get it out of the way.” He pushed his chair away from the table, not quite lifting it from the ground, and then pushed it back into place. He collected his dishes and stacked them by the sink to be washed by whomever was on dishwashing duty today. 

Then he walked down the corridor to where Kirigiri had set up her interview room. He reminded himself to breathe. He reminded himself to unclench his fists. He reminded himself that this was for the good of everyone, to try and fix what Ultimate Despair had broken.

He forced himself to turn the handle and step inside.

The room was set up with two chairs and a video camera watching them both. The chairs were metal, set two feet apart, and Kirigiri was already sitting in one. She looked up at his approach and nodded, but said nothing.

Hajime sat down in the chair, the metal cool and hard, and shifted to try and find a comfortable position. If there was one, he hadn’t found it yet, despite having tried every time he and Kirigiri had been in this room together.

Kirigiri leaned over and turned the camera on before positioning herself back in her chair. She did not squirm. She looked as though her chair was eminently comfortable, her face calm and expressionless, as she sat without a hair out of place. She truly was the Ultimate Detective. 

“This is recording number #16,” Kirigiri said, looking at Hajime and studying his appearance closely. Hajime was suddenly intensely aware of the fact that his hair was rumpled from sleep, and he hadn’t shaved yet. He fidgeted with his hands, unable to find a place for them to rest that felt comfortable. He swallowed twice, convulsively, and reminded himself that neither Monokuma nor the Future Foundation were watching him right now.

“Please state your name for the record,” Kirigiri continued, her voice cool and professional, the voice of a detective used to conducting many interviews for information. The recordings always started with him saying his name. Some days, it was harder for him to remember it than others.

Today, it wasn’t.

“Hinata Hajime,” Hajime said, and was pleased at how easy it was to say that now. It still sounded weird when he said his name, but that was because his voice both sounded exactly as he remembered it sounding and older all at once. It was a cognitive dissonance they all suffered, though it was improving. They were improving.

“Do you remember how Enoshima manipulated you to join Ultimate Despair?”

Hajime shook his head. “Not yet,” he said. “I’m still …” he shrugged helplessly, hands going wide. “My memory’s getting better, but there’s still a lot that I don’t recall.”

Kirigiri nodded. She glanced down at her notebook, ostensibly to refresh her memory. Hajime was fairly sure that she needed no such memory aid, and it was just an affectation. “Have you remembered anything new?”

Hajime nodded. “Yeah, I think so.” He took a breath and let it out slowly. Now that he was trying to talk about it, it was very difficult to find the words he needed. “I had a dream. Another one. From before … before Kamukura.” 

“What was it about?”

Hajime shifted awkwardly in the chair. “Just Enoshima talking to me. Saying that I was her secret.” He shook his head. “I didn’t understand what she meant then. Do you think she knew she was going to use me even then?”

Kirigiri didn’t answer his question. She never did in these sessions. “When before Kamukura did the memory take place?”

“Uh … I guess early? I don’t … I don’t really remember a _date_ …” Hajime said. He offered, in way of explanation, “It was always really hard to keep track of days.” He also hadn’t wanted to keep track of them. At first, the passage of time was simply something to endure until the project was complete and they had transformed him into someone he could be proud to be. Later, time didn’t matter because _nothing_ mattered. If he had known how important time would be to him later, maybe he would have kept better notes of what happened.

He did remember something though. Though the Project had also been the Kamukura Izuru Project, the scientists hadn’t started off calling him ‘Kamukura Izuru’. Not in his hearing, anyway. That happened later on. “It was before everyone started calling me Kamukura to my face though.”

“Early in the procedure then,” Kirigiri said, and Hajime swallowed. He nodded, not trusting his voice to remain level. He wondered how much Kirigiri knew about what had happened to him. 

“Did you want her to come back?” Her voice was cool and passionless.

“You want me to come back.” It’s a whisper in his ear, lipstick-slick lips brushing his earlobe. A promise that unlike everyone else, _she_ will not leave him to be alone, a pathetic shadow of a boy whom everyone else was happy to forget. There is no hope here in this laboratory, not for him. There can only be despair. He wants her back, but he doesn’t remember why. Just that she is important to him, because when she is here he feels something, instead of nothing at all.

“I - I don’t remember,” Hajime said. He could hear his heartbeat thudding loudly in his ears, and his palms were sweaty where they gripped the base of the chair in a white-knuckled grip. “I probably did. She was the only person who talked to me there. No one else there saw me as worth talking to at all.” His memories told him that this was because he hadn’t been anyone worth talking to because he was talentless, but he knew better now. He knew it wasn’t true. Just because his memories told him that didn’t mean that he had to believe it.

Kirigiri frowned slightly, pressing her finger against the earpiece she wore in her right ear. She didn’t look irritated at the interruption, which meant that it had to be Naegi. He interrupted these sessions so infrequently that Hajime had almost managed to forget that he was watching them. 

Hajime took the opportunity to settle his breathing from the shallow pants it had become during the questioning, stretching out the cramps in his stiff and sore hands, and reminded himself that what had happened to him had not been his fault. That was the other problem with these sessions. He had more flashbacks here, because he was trying to remember the past.

“That’s enough for today,” Kirigiri said. She graced him with a rare smile, a small curve of her lips that still managed to transform her face. “You did very well.”

“I didn’t tell you anything useful,” Hajime protested. “I just said that I was lonely.”

“So did everyone else,” Kirigiri said. “It tells us a lot.”

“So long as it helps,” Hajime said. He took a breath and let it go. “Who do you want next?”

“Souda-san,” Kirigiri said. “Whenever he’s ready.”

That was how these sessions always ended as well; Hajime would go and collect the next person, and so on and so on. Hajime always went first. He had been the one who led them through the trials, he had been the one who brought them out of despair, and he would continue to take the first steps towards hope. After all, he could only do it because he knew that they were only a step behind him, and all of them were moving toward their future.

* * *

It was harder to keep that kind of faith in the bad times as well as the good.

A few days after Hajime had heard the news about Naegi, Kirigiri, and Togami’s pending departure, he found himself in a cool, sterile room, lit by half-dimmed lights, with the strange electric smell of lots of machines in a small confined space. This time, at least, he wasn’t there alone. The others were there with him, and it was not at Hope’s Peak Academy.

It was the server room, where the fifteen of them had been connected into the simulation. At the centre of the room was what Hajime assumed to be the server for the simulator, given that there were fifteen futuristic headsets spiralling out from the server. Around the server like spokes on a wheel slept their ten comatose classmates, kept alive by machines. Hajime thought that if he truly tried, he could understand what they were displaying and what that meant for his classmates. 

He tried not to think about that overly much. 

The machines were working as they should, according to Souda, and he would know as he had conducted maintenance on all of them over the last few days. He’d finally pronounced them to be as good as he could make them that morning. Given the he was the Ultimate Mechanic, that likely was beyond anything anyone else could do. At least if they failed to wake their classmates up, it would not be due to a machine failure.

Hajime hates this room. It is the room that has become his whole world since he agreed to their experiment. There is no natural light, no breeze, the only sound the quiet hum of air conditioning and high-tech machinery. He is trapped inside this cage, and —

—it is — it _was_ — it was it was _it was not_ the room that he had lived in while he was part of the Kamukura Izuru Project. He knew where he was. He was Hinata Hajime, he was no longer in Hope’s Peak Academy, and he was no longer in the simulation. He was as safe as he could be right now. His friends were here. He could leave at any time.

“You okay?” Kuzuryuu asked. “You look awful.”

“Yeah,” Hajime said weakly. “I’m good.” He hadn’t had an episode this bad for a while. Not since the first few days after he woke up and Kamukura Izuru’s memories were still jumbled up with Hinata Hajime’s. It was probably stress, he told himself. With Naegi, Kirigiri and Togami leaving in a few days, it was not surprising that he felt unsettled and anxious. With them gone, it’d be up to him to make sure the others didn’t revert back to being part of Ultimate Despair, and he wasn’t sure he was up for that.

Owari was putting up large prints on the walls, print-outs of photographs that Koizumi had taken before she had come to Hope’s Peak Academy. They had already moved in a cage for their three hamsters, which Sonia was cooing over, trying to decide which serial killers to name them after. Kuzuryuu had immediately gone over to Pekoyama and was checking on her, while Souda fiddled with the five unused machines with what looked to be a socket wrench.

Hajime didn’t know how he knew what the tool was called. He forced himself to step through the doorway into the room itself. He took another step.

There is a heavy weight on his chest like a girl leaning against him, pinning him down like a butterfly, blonde hair trailing against his cheek as she cranes her head forward and tells him he can touch her breasts if he can remember his name. She laughs raucously and moves away when he does nothing. He feels nothing, except the way his breath sawed in his chest, the dull pain in his hands as his fingernails buried themselves into the flesh of his palms. He needs to stay with her. He needed to leave.

“I need to go,” Hajime said abruptly. He whirled around on the ball of his foot and ran, ignoring the sounds of his friends calling his name.

The sea breeze was cool against his face, and his knees collapsed under him. 

_Huh…?_ he managed finally, once his head cleared enough to think of anything at all other than the overwhelming need to run. _That was unexpected. When did_ that _happen?_

He didn’t know how long he sat on the beach. The tide had come in while he was spaced out, the ocean lapping against his shoes. _Another pair of ruined shoes,_ he found himself thinking. He must be recovering, if he could think of shoes.

“Here you are,” he heard. He looked up to see a corona of sun-kissed fair hair. Sonia. Of course.

“S-sorry…” he offered as Sonia sat down next to him in a sweep of skirts. She removed her shoes and rested her feet in the water. “I don’t know what happened before.”

“There is no need to apologise,” Sonia said firmly. “We are all in this together! What did you remember?” 

“Enoshima again,” Hajime said. He grimaced, feeling the flush spread across his face. “She was uh … trying to get me to say my name. I didn’t remember it.”

“Your name is Hinata Hajime,” Sonia said solemnly, which was an absurd thing for her to say, but Hajime appreciated the thought anyway.

“How did Enoshima get to you?” Hajime asked. It had been a question that had plagued him since they had woken up. He had a theory about how Enoshima had gotten to them all, based on what he could remember of what she would say to him in his memories, but he thought that Sonia might tell him.

Sonia said nothing. It was a tense silence, and she watched him warily. 

He supposed it would be up to him to start and lead the way. 

It was harder than he thought to start speaking. He cleared his throat twice.

“She uh … when they were … making Kamukura,” he said awkwardly. “No one came to see me. I had no friends in the reserve course, or outside school either. My parents didn’t come either. No one talked to me, except her. I didn’t think she liked me, but she spoke to me. She was the only one.”

Sonia still said nothing, but she was listening intently.

“I think he loved her. He. Me.” Hajime shook his head sharply. “It’s a bit confusing.”

“We all did,” Sonia said, blushing prettily. 

_Wait. What?_ Hajime blinked in surprise. That raised a number of possibilities, and Hajime wasn’t sure that he wanted to remember any of them. He cleared his throat, his blush now incandescent. “I thought that was just Tsumiki,” he managed finally. “You mean …all of us?”

“Er … yes,” Sonia said. “I suppose you do not remember that yet.”

“Uh … no.” Hajime wondered what other surprises lay in his repressed memories. It might be best that he _didn’t_ find out.

Sonia placed her hands into her lap, folding them neatly around one another. She studied her nails as she spoke. “When I arrived at Hope’s Peak Academy I had high hopes of finding cross-cultural companionship and friendship. I had studied all of the Japanese dramas I could find about overseas students, and I thought that I was prepared. I was not.”

 _Yeah, that’s not a surprise,_ Hajime thought. _Dramas aren’t really all that much like real life. They’d be boring if they were._

“Being the Ultimate Princess … it is something you _are_ , and not something you do,” Sonia went on. Hajime wasn’t sure that he believed that. Ever since he had woken up on the island Sonia had kept them focused without losing her poise and presence, which given the circumstances, must have been extraordinarily difficult. It wasn’t something he could have done, that’s for sure. “There was much talk about ‘talent’ and ‘hope’ but … that was all Hope’s Peak Academy was interested in. They were not interested in the people, but instead their talents. It was very stifling being treated as just your talent. I did not matter at all.”

Hajime was reminded of Nanami telling him that being the best at what he did wasn’t as important as being someone he could be proud of. He remembered being Kamukura, who had all number of talents, yet still not a person he could be proud of.

“So, when Enoshima-san said that she would destroy the place that had focused so much on meaningless things like ‘talent’ and ‘hope’, I could not say no.”

Hajime could understand that, he thought. During the last class trial he had had to confront his own feelings of betrayal and hatred towards Hope’s Peak Academy. It had been hard for him to move forward, and he doubted he could have done it without Nanami. He hoped that he could help the others move forward without her.

His chest ached with how much he wanted her to come back. None of them were programmers, and he knew that the Ultimate Programmer was now dead. Perhaps Kamukura Izuru could bring her back, if Hajime could remember whether that talent had been carved into his brain. He wasn’t sure he had the courage to try to remember. There had been a lot of surgeries.

“I miss Nanami,” he confessed. “She would have made sense of all this. I wish we had saved her.”

“Me too,” Sonia said, her voice soft. She gazed out on the water, her hand holding his. Anchoring him to the here and now. “She was always very nice to us all.”

“She was pretty weird,” Hajime said. “She used to fall asleep all the time, and kept talking about flags and routes in video games. She didn’t know _anything_ about the outside world … though I guess that makes sense. Given what she was.”

Hajime sighed.

“Before the shutdown, she saved us.” He breathed a laugh. “I was all set to give up. Just not make any decisions because I wasn’t even an Ultimate Student, just some reserve student who wasn’t good enough to be at Hope’s Peak. Who was I to make decisions?”

He looked over at Sonia. “But she told me that _we_ can shape our future. That it didn’t have to be just the choices that Enoshima gave us, that we could make our future our own, if we were willing to be responsible for it.”

“We will have to remember that,” Sonia said. “It is going to be very difficult for us to be here alone.”

“Yeah,” Hajime agreed. “I mean, we want to wake up everyone else, right? None of us are doctors or anything, so it’s gonna be hard, especially when we don’t make any progress. We just have to remember that we’re all in this together.”

Sonia took his other hand in hers, teasing it out from the anxious ball it had curled into. In the flesh of his palm were four raw half-crescents from where his fingernails had tried to break the skin. She squeezed his hand in hers briefly before letting it go. Hajime smiled weakly, despite the sharp pain.

“I am glad that it is _you_ who woke up,” Sonia said. “I could not imagine what we would do without you here.” 

“I’m glad I did too,” Hajime said. “I didn’t like being Kamukura much.” He didn’t remember much of being Kamukura, but what he remembered was disinterest in everything. He thought Kamukura might have been lonely, but he didn’t think that Kamukura had known the words to say that. Enoshima would have found it harder to win him over, he thought, if there had been anything in his life other than the four walls of the laboratory.

They had that now, at least.

“Come on,” he said. He stood up, and offered his hand to Sonia. “Let’s go back inside.”

She took his hand, and he pulled her up. Pulling her up made the raw crescents in his palm throb with pain, but that was all right. Being alive hurt, but it was a pain he was willing to endure.

“Thank you,” he said. “For listening.”

“Thank you for listening too,” Sonia replied. “We may need you to help us get on our feet, but you will not ever be alone.”

That was something he also had to remember. He had thought, before waking up on Jabberwock Island, that becoming the person he wanted to be meant being able to stand on your own, without needing help from anyone else. That wouldn’t work on Jabberwock Island. Being isolated didn’t make you strong. Being isolated made you weak and vulnerable. It was okay to trust others and rely on them. They would trust and support you.

It was all right to be afraid, Hajime decided as they made their way back to the Future Foundation’s building. They would face it together.

* * *

After his session with Kirigiri, the twentieth since he had awoken from the simulator, Hajime returned to his room wrung out and too exhausted to do anything other than lie on his bed. He was too tired to sleep, and he didn’t want to dream anyway. It was impossible to escape from a dream.

Today, she had wanted to know what he remembered after leaving Hope’s Peak Academy. Hajime hadn’t realised that Kirigiri had been investigating Kamukura’s actions at that stage, and so it had come as a surprise how much she already knew. All he had done was confirm her expectations.

Unfortunately, Hajime was left with his racing thoughts. What _had_ he done after he left the school? Hope’s Peak had tracked him for a little while after he had left the school, but he had thrown off their trackers before long. Only Enoshima had been able to keep up with him, and that likely was because at that point the only thing that was driving Kamukura was despair. There had been nothing left for him at that point.

He arrives at an apartment complex, eight storeys of apartments stacked on top of one another, and walks up the stairs. He walks past four people, and mentally assesses what risk they might pose to him. He hopes that one of them does try and jump him, if only because he had predicted that they would not and it would be novel. Unfortunately, they do not, and he reaches his destination without incident. He reaches into his pocket and pulls out a key, inserting it into the lock and turning it. The lock turns easily, and the door swings open — 

— Hajime sat up and bit down hard on his tongue. The pain was sharp and bright, but it worked and he remembered where he was. Who he was. He knew what happened next, and didn’t need to relive it. He had read the investigation file into his parents’ murder, and he knew that he hadn’t been in his right mind at the time.

“Right,” Hajime said. “I need some fresh air.”

He also needed some time alone with his thoughts, and so when he remembered that he could scale walls now, he didn’t consider it deeply.

Or at least, he didn’t until he tried to do it. Then he remembered that it was not Hinata Hajime who could climb walls, but instead Kamukura Izuru. Kamukura places his hand into the crack between two bricks, and Hajime remembered that he didn’t know what to do with his feet. He fell, and Kamukura catches himself. Hajime’s breath came in half-sobs as he closed his eyes and trusts his hands and feet to take him the rest of the way.

Once he made it he drew his knees up to his chest. His head ached from trying to decide which part of his muscle memory belonged to him and which from Kamukura. He suspected most of it came from Kamukura. Hajime had been quite average at climbing things, and he certainly could not have scaled a building.

Still. He was Hinata Hajime. His sense of self had not wavered once since he had achieved the roof. That was important. Maybe he could use Kamukura’s talents without losing himself. Maybe there was a hope that he could use his abilities to bring the others back. It would have to wait though.

Once his breathing settled, he looked around. From his perch on the roof of the Future Foundation’s headquarters, Hajime could see the entire island from coast to coast. As achievements went, however, being able to see the whole island was not particularly impressive, as he was only a few storeys off the ground. Jabberwock Island was simply just that small. Hajime remembered how the island had felt on their first few days, how it had felt almost too small for the eighteen of them — though he thought that there would never be enough space for them and Monokuma — and how it had become increasingly empty as their classmates were killed.

Or, not killed. They weren’t dead. He had to remember that. Comatose meant that they could be brought back one day, once their memories were found in the server. After all, he was here. Why couldn’t they create another miracle? Jabberwock Island was going to be his world until they were able to wake up their classmates. He should get used to it. It wasn’t like he was going to be the only one in this world. There would be others here with him. Friends. He smiled at the thought. He wasn’t alone, even if his memories of Enoshima Junko told him otherwise.

Down below, he could see Naegi leave the building, still dressed in his black suit despite the heat. The three from the Future Foundation always wore suits, though it might be so that they looked older and more responsible. If he did the math right, they were a year younger than him. Nineteen to his twenty.

As he watched, Naegi turned around, scanning the nearby surroundings. Hajime wondered what he was doing, and received his answer a short time later when Naegi called out Hajime’s name.

“I’m up here,” Hajime called. Naegi looked around again, before he looked up. And up.

“Oh, you’re up there…” Naegi commented, craning his head up. He frowned. “How did you get up there?”

“I guess one of the talents Kamukura had was Ultimate Traceur,” Hajime said. He tried to sound casual about it, but he still felt strange and disconnected from his own body. “I wanted to see the whole island.”

“What’s the view like?” Naegi asked. 

“A lot like the simulation,” Hajime said. “I can come down, just give me a second.”

Climbing down was easier than climbing up. On the way up, Hajime had known where to put his hands and feet, but had also _not_ known, and the dichotomy between the two had made the climb a rather fraught experience. On the way down, he accepted that he knew how to climb, and that in accepting this knowledge he _didn’t_ feel like Enoshima was starting to reclaim him.

Fear, it seemed made him do stupid things.

Once down, he opened and closed his hands a few times, stretching them out from where they had been sore from carrying his weight.

“I was just thinking up there,” Hajime offered in way of explanation.

“It looks like a good place to think,” Naegi agreed. “What were you thinking about?”

“Hope,” Hajime said. “And why I’m here, and not Kamukura. I thought before you all went, you should know, so that meant I had to know.”

“We’d like to know,” Naegi said. “You don’t have to tell us, but if you can, it might help with other people that Enoshima brainwashed. Even if it doesn’t… it’s good to know.”

Hajime nodded. If they were going to try using the Neo World Program to try and reprogram other people back to who they used to be, he was the best example of how things could go as catastrophically wrong as possible and _still_ turn out okay. 

He had a theory, but it seemed pretty threadbare. Still, based on what Sonia had told him the other day, and what Kirigiri had said earlier in the week, it was as good a theory as any, he supposed.

“I think …” Hajime said, and stopped. He frowned in thought. “I think that I won over Kamukura because I wanted to live.” He gestured helplessly with his hands, searching for the words he wanted to use. “Despair is … it’s really hollow. And that was all he had.”

“You had your friends,” Naegi said. “Kamukura didn’t have anyone.”

“Yeah,” Hajime said. “Maybe that was all we needed. Friends.” He laughed because it wasn’t funny at all to appreciate that the world had been tipped into utter chaos in part because he hadn’t made any friends. Because he had disliked himself so much he had turned himself into someone who didn’t understand why he would want friends.

Naegi was looking at him with some concern.

“Sorry,” Hajime said quickly, swallowing his laughter. “It’s not really funny.”

Naegi didn’t ask whether he was all right, for which Hajime was intensely grateful for. Instead, he tilted his head and asked, “What will you do now?”

“What does the Future Foundation want us to do?” Hajime asked in return.

“That’s not important,” Naegi said firmly. “I think you know by now that we don’t have to do what they say.”

“Then … we want to stay here,” Hajime said. “I know Enoshima said that our friends can’t wake up, that they’re gone forever. But she also said that _I_ was gone forever too. I don’t think we can really believe that what she said was true. Right?”

“Right,” Naegi agreed. “She wanted you to give up.”

Hajime sighed. “But what are the Future Foundation going to do when you come back without us? Will you be all right?”

Naegi shrugged. “I have no idea,” he confessed. “But we won’t tell them about you and where you are.”

“Yeah, Togami said that too,” Hajime said. _He also said you were a terrible liar,_ he left unspoken. Naegi might be a terrible liar, but right now, on this deserted beach, Hajime wanted to believe in Naegi. No wonder Enoshima had removed the memories of her classmates, if someone like this had been a classmate of hers. His conviction, his capacity to not only hope for a better future but strive toward it, was amazing.

It seemed laughable that Komaeda had hoped to be the Ultimate Hope while Naegi was around.

“If you needed us to,” Naegi said, “we would stay. The Future Foundation helped us, but they can’t make us do something that we don’t think is right.”

“Thanks, but I think we need to try to save _ourselves_ this time,” Hajime said. “You saved us — twice. When you found us, and when that AI took over the simulator. And don’t get me wrong, we appreciate it! But I think it’s our turn.”

It seemed that that was the right answer. Naegi smiled at him, and if Hajime had thought that his faith and conviction was impressive before, he was breathtaking now. “We look forward to seeing it,” he said. “We’ll be leaving soon but… if you need us, let us know. We will find a way to get you any help you need.”

“I know,” Hajime said. “And… we are scared. But we’ve got each other. Don’t worry about us. We’ll make it.”

“You will,” Naegi said. “Because this is _your_ hope. Your future. And as long as you keep that future in sight, you’ll be all right.”

This wasn’t what Hajime had initially hoped for, when he had found himself trapped on Jabberwock Island. He had hoped to leave as quickly as possible, to resume his life at Hope’s Peak and try and learn to be special so that he could be liked. There had been so much he hadn’t understood: about Hope’s Peak Academy, about the nature of hope and despair. About himself, and his own power to transform his future into one of his own making. For so long he had been forced down one path, one chosen by someone else. Now he was free to choose his own path. They all were.

He had been scarred along the way. The scars from Hope’s Peak Academy were razor thin, but he could feel them when he ran his hand through his hair. The scars from Enoshima Junko were harder to see, and they pulled at his psyche in strange and unexpected ways. He had survived, though. He had survived Hope’s Peak Academy. He had survived Enoshima Junko. They all had. That was important. That _mattered._ And there was nothing anyone could do to take that knowledge away from them.

The future was theirs.


End file.
